The Sons of Éléonore
by Igenlode Wordsmith
Summary: Raoul de Chagny had never known a mother... but his brother Philippe had never been able to forget her. And when he plunged down beneath the Opera in pursuit, the past went with him.
1. Chagny

_Author's Note: If anybody has been awaiting the next translated instalment of "Imprisoned by Fear" with bated breath, I'm afraid that this story intervened: normal service will be resumed shortly._

* * *

 **Chapter 1: CHAGNY**

Lost and furious in the dark below the Palais Garnier, Philippe de Chagny no longer knew if he was going to fall upon his little brother's neck and weep when he finally caught up with him, or simply strangle the wretch. It was a mingling of emotions with which he had become all too familiar of late where the young Vicomte was concerned; tonight, however, much as he loved the boy, he had to admit that Raoul really had surpassed himself.

Only Raoul, in the first place, could have contrived to instil confusion into a perfectly ordinary intrigue with a pretty opera-singer by reviving the phantom of a boy-and-girl affair between a pair of children in a Breton village. Only Raoul, with an infuriating mixture of obstinacy and innocence, could have failed to recognise in his enchanting Miss Daaé a conniving minx who'd had her Vicomte dancing on a string for months. And only Raoul, in league with that confounded girl, could have managed to botch up their elopement in a manner calculated to inconvenience to the maximum not only his long-suffering elder brother but the audience and employees of an entire opera house.

Up above stage, thanks to those antics, the Opera was in a seething ferment. Down here — Philippe raised higher the lantern that he held, and dizzying shadows chased between beams and cables all around — down here, amid the deserted machinery and the endless dark of the building's lower levels, a spreading silence lay in wait for the intruder and threatened to stifle every breath.

The Comte cursed between his teeth, closing the lantern's shutter and peering into the dimly-lit distance in the hope of catching an answering flicker. "Raoul!"

The last anyone had heard of the boy, he had been talking wildly and trying to force a way down here. Which just went to prove, Philippe thought grimly, that Raoul had gone completely off his head; God send he hadn't broken his neck down some yawning trapdoor masquerading as no more than a deeper shadow, or strung himself up in the loop of some ascending counterweight like a felon on the scaffold.

The old helpless pain caught at the back of his throat and he thrust it back down. Where Raoul was concerned, there had been too much hurt in the family already.

~o~

Philippe de Chagny had been twenty years old, the summer he'd learned the Comtesse his mother was expecting again. His sisters Suzanne and Héloïse at eight and twelve respectively had been young enough to regard it as little more than the promise of another big doll; Philippe, flushed with all the brittle sophistication of a young man who had been on the town for three seasons already, had been conscious only of the acute humiliation of his position. How could his mother do this to him? He was a grown man now in his own right, and his parents' situation was worse than embarrassing — it was ridiculous.

His father he had regarded always with the faint contempt reserved for the well-meaning but ineffectual. Old Comte Philibert had been an armchair scholar, an amateur of history never happier than when immersed in the research of their family quarterings or in fancying himself back in the days of the Valois, and in all matters practical he had long since yielded up dominion to his wife.

It had been a dynastic match, and a good one. Éléonore de Moerogis had brought with her not only vast estates at La Martynière, wide-set blue eyes and a wealth of wheat-coloured curls, but also a cool, commanding intelligence that upheld her husband's interests against the ambition of their de Chagny cousins and won her the respect of his man of business and everyone else who dealt with her. She had made every decision in their lives as far back as Philippe could remember, and he'd worshipped her.

Growing up, he'd ridden out with her across hills and woods or flung himself down, all coltish limbs and enthusiasm, before the fire in her parlour to argue out some burning point; as a child he brought her laces and ribbons and fairings just to see those fine eyes soften in a smile, and, later on, leatherbound journals from the best stationers, or theatre tickets for the shared pleasure they found in the stage. She'd kept his boyish secrets safe from prying small sisters, and met his gaze with veiled laughter at the pomposities of elderly generals over the dinner-table, or fluttering enticements cast out by pretty girls. He'd been _twelve_ when Suzanne was born, an eternity ago. How could she — how dared she — make such a spectacle of herself now?

Caught up in his own sulky grievance, it hadn't even occurred to him that a last late child might carry with it hazards beyond sniggers from the fast young set. He'd dismissed his father's anxious circlings as the fussing of an elderly fool, and left the mother he'd adored to spend that last autumn alone with the seclusion of her burgeoning belly and the knowledge of the ordeal to come.

He'd been in Paris — with a woman — when the messenger arrived. By the time he'd reached the chateau at Chagny, it had already been too late to see his mother alive again. And his father had become a doddering invalid overnight.

She'd lived long enough to name the child: Raoul-Hilaire-Marie. It was Héloïse, a whey-faced shadow in black, who had greeted him and taken him up to see the crumpled scrap in its cradle. He remembered looking down at it, expecting to feel hate: but he'd felt nothing, nothing at all, save the aching in his head from the jolting of the road and a vague numb disappointment that there was so little, after all, to show for so much pain and devastation.

It had been three days later, at the funeral, when Raoul had turned unfocused blue eyes up from his nurse's arms to meet Philippe, that he'd seen the sudden ghost of their mother's gaze there for the first time. He'd made an excuse to turn away; made an excuse, as soon as the earth had begun to settle on the Comtesse Éléonore's grave, to leave his father, leave Chagny, and leave the memories behind.

Comte Philibert had never been the same again. At the time, unforgiving, Philippe had laid that down squarely to guilt. He understood now, twenty years later, that the old man had above all been simply bereft: the guiding force that ruled his life was gone, leaving him lost and rudderless, and the seizure that struck him down a month later had only confirmed in body the lack of will that had already overcome his heart.

Philippe had been in Biarritz by the time this fresh news reached him. He had written back, tersely, with instructions that his father's affairs should be laid in the hands of old Gaulthier the lawyer, who had worked with the Comtesse to run the estates for years and whom she had trusted completely. Then he had flung himself back into the whirl of worldly pleasures and done his best to forget that he had an infant brother at all.

~o~

There was a place, after all, for opera-girls in one's life, Philippe thought now, remembering those years; remembering Sorelli, who had graced his arm of late, and the lovely long legs she knew how to use so well. He ducked beneath a beam, searching for the stairs that would take him down towards the cellars where Raoul in his ravings had certainly gone.

There was a place for opera-girls in one's life, and no-one had been more delighted than he when Raoul had finally shown leanings in that direction. But one did not attempt to marry them.

He'd had grand alliances planned for Raoul: one of the Moerogis girl-cousins, perhaps, when they were a little older and the boy had some experience under his belt. But if the young Vicomte had formed a preference of his own for some other eligible maiden, Philippe would have been happy to indulge that choice. There were any number of pretty, well-bred girls who could have graced his brother's seat at table and taken up his mother's rôle as chatelaine at Chagny in the fullness of time, and Raoul could have had his pick among them.

Even a _bourgeoise_ would have done, if he had set his heart on it. In the darkness below stage, with that aching fear for Raoul's safety twisting in his throat, Philippe de Chagny admitted to himself at last that he would have set aside rank and pride for the boy's sake, if it had come to that. They were no longer in the seventeenth century and he was not Comte Philibert, for whom purity of lineage had represented the obsession of a lifetime.

If Raoul, with that stubbornness of his, had wanted some rich manufacturer's daughter, then in the end his brother would have yielded: if the girl herself were presentable and quick to learn, and her parents not too gross or encroaching in their vulgarity. But a girl off the public stage — a girl who paraded herself alongside a creature like Sorelli across the _foyer de la danse_ — a girl who sang for her supper three nights a week for all Paris to ogle, and for all the subscribers to accost behind-scenes? It was out of the question absolutely. Raoul might as well have set a common courtesan up in their mother's place, and if he'd been thinking with what lay between his ears instead of what lay between his legs he would have seen that as clearly as Philippe.

There was a place for opera-girls in one's life. And there was no room in it for protestations of virtue.

~o~

Philippe at twenty-one had known no shortage of women. Some of them had been accommodating. Some of them had been of his own class. Some of them — the married ones — had been both.

In a life that revolved around the casino, his club and the racecourse, he'd taken time steadily and cynically to make the acquaintance of every acceptable female in town, and many who were not. He'd found them without exception to be vapid, foolish and complaisant; and he had never found an intelligence he could respect, let alone a fine blue gaze to challenge the memory that haunted his own.

He'd spent perhaps three months down at Chagny over the years that followed. He could not endure the sight of the old Comte sitting trapped and palsied in his chair, or the reproachful eyes of his sisters like trailing ghosts about the empty house. Somewhere in the nursery wing there was a small child growing into boyhood. Suzanne and Héloïse fussed over him, when they thought Philippe's attention was elsewhere, and occasionally the boy would make an appearance, hangdog and shy.

Ten years after his mother's death, he'd begun to take serious thought to find a wife of his own. Not because there remained any expectation of meeting the woman whom he had sought for so long, for he could see none, but with the vague idea that he would need someday to beget an heir.

He'd made enquiries of Gaulthier as to his financial position, obtained no very satisfactory answers, and come to the unwelcome realisation that with increasing years affairs had been slipping through the old man's grasp. Hard upon that had come the news of his father's second seizure.

He'd come home to Chagny with all thoughts of marriage driven from his head, to find Héloïse a sad-eyed spinster keeping house, Suzanne long since outgrown from her schoolgirl dresses, and the estates running fast down to rack and ruin while Comte Philibert lay curtained and silent in the great bed, with one side of his face slipped down like candle-wax, and neither moved nor spoke. Gaulthier, wringing his hands in distress, was a withered shadow of the man he'd once been, but he'd done his best to keep to the Comtesse's trust, and Philippe could not find it in him to berate the old lawyer for infirmity in the face of a task for which he had long since merited relief. Instead he had set himself, grimly, to learn in just what state matters now stood, and how they could best be amended.

It was three weeks later, when he'd finally begun to grasp the magnitude of the task ahead of him, that he'd called a family conclave to warn the others how things lay; and it was Raoul — small, fair-haired Raoul at the end of the table — who had spoken up first of all to renounce the division of their inheritance, in the shocked silence that had followed. It had been a schoolboy impulse, of course, the gesture of a child with a head full of vows of chivalry and nostalgic tales from the days of primogeniture. But Héloïse, who was no fool, had nodded and added her voice to the boy's, and then Suzanne, the three of them laying their shares back into his hands for the good of the land and its people... and Philippe de Chagny had looked down the length of the table into those clear blue eyes, and seen there for the first time not the painful ghost of their mother, but Raoul in his own right.

They'd all of them believed Comte Philibert could not last out the month. In the event, the old man had lingered on for two summers more, while the weight of the estates fell ever more heavily across Philippe's shoulders and the family fortunes began at last to return to what they had been in Éléonore's time. He'd had little enough leisure for Suzanne and Héloïse in those months of unremitting labour, let alone for a new-found brother whom he'd hardly begun to know. But it had all come to an end one quiet winter's morning when his valet had awoken him with a deferential murmur of _'Monsieur le Comte'_ , and the inevitable news.

It had not, precisely, been a surprise. But with his father laid to rest at last, the full force of it had begun to sink in. He — Philippe-Georges-Marie de Chagny, who had lived almost all his life for pleasure — was now head of one of the oldest families in France, with two sisters on his hands already overripe for marriage... and sole responsibility for a twelve-year-old boy.


	2. Brittany

**Chapter 2 — Brittany**

It had been high time in any case that something was done about Raoul's education. Philippe had resolved to take the boy in hand himself; discovered all too quickly that beyond reading, writing and figuring, the child was little more than a country bumpkin whose native wit failed to cover a head full of fables and a state of lamentable ignorance. Héloïse, who had always had the run of their father's library, had volunteered along with Suzanne to help remedy the deficiencies of his governess and to teach him a little social polish. But as winter wore on into spring, the two sisters were soon caught up in lessons of a far more pleasurable kind — a de Chagny match was still a marriage worth having, and the new Comte had acquaintances who were not averse to becoming suitors for such an alliance — and old Tante Marguerite down in Brest had seemed at the time to offer the perfect solution.

Brisk, kindly Tante Marguerite with her musical soirées and her snapping black eyes had always been Philippe's favourite among his de Chagny aunts; her husband, Roger de Marsèmy, had been a naval officer retired through ill-health, and in childhood memory their home in Brest had always been bustling with visits from old friends freshly returned from the East or refitting with the Fleet. Filled with curios, laughter and tall tales, back then the house had seemed a haven for small boys, and when he'd sent Raoul off to Brittany Philippe had truly meant it all for the best. But their uncle Roger had been dead long since of the recurring fever that had first made him an invalid, and Tante Marguerite's piano sat silent in the parlour as aging fingers grew weary and stiff... and for a shy child newly-orphaned and bereft of the sisters who had cosseted him since birth, Philippe realised at last and far too late, it had made for a solitary and a lonely existence.

That was why the boy had taken up with the Daaés, of course. Tante Marguerite had taken a house for the summer at Lannion, a few kilometres from the coast, and Raoul and his governess had been sent out to take the air. The good woman had come back indignant, with her charge in borrowed clothes, and a tale of a strolling fiddler, a long walk, and a little girl in a peasant scarf that fluttered into the sea. They'd gone back the next day to retrieve Raoul's suit... and the next day, and the next. Starved of friendships his own age, brought up in a household of women, Raoul had struck up an instant childish bond with little Christine and with the vagrant fiddler, her father.

Comte Philibert had been distant and ailing, and Philippe, ill at ease with children, had not known how to take his place. Old man Daaé had done so without a moment's thought, wrapping the boy in the warmth with which he encircled his own beloved daughter, and that summer had proved the happiest of Raoul's young life. The happiest — the Vicomte had flung back at his brother in their quarrel last night — that he was ever to know again.

Philippe had meant to visit the boy at some point, naturally. But the journey via Paris was a slow one, his sisters were in a fair way to being happily established, with their portions needing to be shared out before the contracts could be drawn up and the wedding date set, and it was not until Tante Marguerite's letter had reached him with its news of his brother's new-found preoccupation with Perros-Guirec that he had come post-haste down to Brittany to see for himself.

His aunt, kindly as ever, had seen nothing wrong with the friendship. She'd given him some confused account of an old Swedish couple from Paris and their musical protegés — always the sure way to Tante Marguerite's heart — which had done nothing at all to mollify Philippe's disquiet. Raoul, of course, was nowhere to be seen. In the end, cutting his aunt's expostulations short, the Comte had caught up his hat and gloves and driven straight out unannounced to the inlet at Trestraou to find this fishing-village and, if necessary, bring back his brother whether he liked it or not.

But it hadn't been some ragged peasant on the beach. It had been Professor Valerius with his dove-coloured waistcoat and his pince-nez and his neat grey beard, watching benignly from the depths of a steamer-chair set up for him on the strand, like the most respectable great-uncle in the world. And the fair-haired boy who'd come pelting head-down along the shining sand with the other child in pursuit — both of them shrieking in excitement — bore so little resemblance to the subdued Raoul he knew that Philippe had wondered for a moment if he'd been mistaken.

 _"Monsieur mon frère!"_ Raoul had almost cannoned into him; looked up in astonishment and delight.

"Philippe," the Comte corrected with a smile, stooping to kiss his brother, and felt the boy's arms tight about his neck.

 _"M'sieu le Comte?"_ The little Daaé had hung back, scraping the sand from one bare foot against the other in a gesture that had nothing of the coquette about it. She'd worn no scarf that day, and her fair plaits were windblown.

"Please don't take Raoul away, _m'sieu_." She'd faltered, and he'd caught a trace of Swedish. "He... he has been so happy."

That first thought had not been for herself. It was the first thing one noticed about her even as a child, Philippe remembered now, admitting it against his will. She'd thought of others, and she'd been kind.

~o~

He hadn't taken Raoul. He wished— he wished to God now that he had, but he'd let the old Professor talk him out of it.

"These small ones... they should not be always with the old." Valerius' soft accent had held self-knowledge and regret. "My Christine, _monsieur_ — she learns now to play as a child. We think to give her all things, but this we cannot."

But it was not for the sake of the good Professor's conscience that Raoul had spent the rest of that summer at Perros-Guirec, nor even the thought of Tante Marguerite's stooped back and the grey hairs of the governess nodding quietly in the sun. It had been the eager delight in the boy's eyes and the warm unthinking welcome of that embrace that had meant Philippe could deny him nothing... even if that meant hiring a room at the inn in future for the boy and his governess to stay.

"For I might want to see the sunset." Raoul had been guileless. "And it's very hard, don't you think, for the poor lady to walk from Lannion so often?"

From what Philippe had observed of _Madame la gouvernante_ 's ample figure, this last was very probable; but he had forborne to make the obvious rejoinder that perhaps Raoul should come a little less often. Instead, he had made quiet arrangements to reserve accommodation for the rest of the season. No doubt there would be night-time expeditions on the heath and ghost-tales after dark and all the other mischief to which small boys were prone — but such things, in moderation, could only improve the young Vicomte's character. And Philippe had been ready to give a good deal, by that summer, to see his brother flushed and healthy and laughing, and no longer delicate and forlorn.

He had even unbent far enough, at the Professor's plea, to speak to old Daaé and request as a humble favour that he should give lessons on his instrument to Raoul. It had been Tante Marguerite's idea to buy tuition for the boy, but it seemed the old fiddler, to whom music was a sacrament, had in some way taken offence; and it was only with considerable diplomacy on Valerius' part and assurances from Philippe that no money would change hands that he had been brought to consent.

The Comte had not been accustomed to pay visits to rustic musicians. But Daaé had been respectably dressed, and his playing — Philippe was something of a judge of music — more sophisticated than one would have supposed. According to Tante Marguerite, the daughter performed also: to Philippe's relief, however, the spectacle of this infant recital, at least, was one to which he had not been subjected.

He had driven back to Lannion that night with the feeling that duty had been done, and with Raoul curled on the seat beside him silent with pure happiness in the dusk. If he had thought of Brittany at all in the hectic months that followed, it had been only to envy the boy his carefree youth and freedom from such arrangements as wedding-breakfasts, bride-portions, and marriage-contracts.

But the summer had ended at last, and with it the final negotiations. Héloïse and Suzanne had been safely married in suitably befitting state, and received their inheritance from their brother's hands in the form of land in good heart and investments well made. And Raoul had come back for the joint ceremony in the chapel at Chagny with a brown face and bright hair and at least a thumb's-width of extra height, to be much cosseted by all the dowagers and wept over by the loving brides.

That winter in Brest, he had quietly turned thirteen, and Philippe had engaged him a tutor.

~o~

Young Mr. Jackson had been fresh from Oxford University, where he had obtained excellent results and rowed upon the river Thames, and with his coming Tante Marguerite's household had begun to regain some of its old lively air. The tutor had reported to Philippe that Raoul was applying himself in his studies, that his English was greatly improved, and that he showed interest in going to sea, to which end enquiries might with advantage be pursued. At Tante Marguerite's request, violin lessons had been arranged for him in the town; but the Vicomte's enthusiasm had lapsed, and he made only lacklustre progress.

Philippe had shrugged off the latter — music was a fine hobby for a man of leisure, but scarcely a social requirement — and simply written back to cancel the lessons. As for the rest, he was highly pleased with the boy, and had taken pains to let him know it.

He'd given no further thought, then or later, to Perros-Guirec. And if Raoul himself had harboured secret hopes, expectations even, of sitting again at old Daaé's feet that summer, then he had kept them treasured unspoken in his breast, where they had died. Tante Marguerite, who was feeling her age, had made no further sojourns in Lannion... and the sands at Trestraou were a hundred kilometres away.


	3. Paris

**Chapter 3 — Paris**

Ships had come and gone in the great bay at Brest Roads, over the years. Raoul had become an uncle three times over as his sisters burgeoned into contented domesticity and families of their own, and had grown out of his shy childhood into a quiet but determined youth. He and Philippe had had a trial or two of wills already, for all their mutual affection; but under Mr. Jackson's tuition he had been preparing his mathematics to enter upon the rigours of navigation in that nautical training on which his heart remained set, and at this juncture the Comte had more than once been consoling himself with the prospect. Naval discipline might do wonders to curb the boy's impetuous streak, and with their mother's excellent understanding and sound judgement he bid fair to shine in the ranks of the cadets. There had been an admiral among their ancestors, after all: the great Chagny de La Roche, who had held high office under Richelieu and brought confusion to the Spanish off Cadiz.

What Philippe hadn't known — hadn't had the faintest idea of, until Raoul cast it back in his teeth last night — was the first use to which his little brother had put his new-found independence. With his place at the Academy secure, with his cadet uniforms tailored and his trunks packed for the forthcoming term, he'd chosen to ignore the future's beckoning glories and taken himself on the off-chance back to Perros in quest of a childhood dream.

Before taking up his new life, he'd gone looking for his playmate Christine. He'd found her a girl on the brink of womanhood just as his own manhood had begun to dawn. And he'd let her entangle him, hopelessly and foolishly, beyond belief.

Philippe didn't know how she'd done it. From Raoul, of course, one could get nothing: the Daaé girl had brought him to the stage where he would hear nothing against her. She'd been a pallid nobody in Paris, and until she'd blossomed forth on that gala night Philippe had seen her name half a dozen times or more on programmes at the opera and never thought twice of the girl he'd met for one afternoon all those years ago. But she'd set her claws into the Vicomte, and for that he could not forgive her.

He couldn't forgive Raoul either. The boy had made a fool of himself from start to finish, made a fool out of Philippe and a laughing-stock of the family name. With his head full of fairy-tales of chivalry and chastity and knights in shining armour, back then he'd already pledged that preposterous adolescent vow of fidelity in love to a future bride.

Philippe had laughed in the boy's face when Raoul had admitted it, and regretted his mockery in the hot flood of shame that stung his brother's flushed features. It had taken courage, he knew, to admit to such a thing beneath the lash of adult scorn. But he caught back a bark of angry laughter again now, remembering: as if one _loved_ the lightskirts with whom one sought amusement. As if _love_ had anything to do with bedsport, still less with marriage.

If he'd had any idea, he would have seen to the boy's education in the matter long since. But young officers in the navy — La Royale — were not known for their monk-like habits, and he'd hardly expected that after a year in foreign parts Raoul would come home as lily-pure as a girl who'd never left her mother's side.

Philippe had made his own discoveries behind the proverbial haystack at sixteen with a tenant's sturdy young wife in a spirit of mutually unabashed curiosity, and she'd been good enough not to laugh. He'd learned a good deal from Perrette in the course of their snatched meetings, that summer; not least the gentle way she'd sent him packing when the cool nights came, with no hard feelings on either side and no injury to his young pride. It was a lesson he'd put to good use in more ways than one where women were concerned, and he'd remembered her fondly for years. She was a grandmother now, ruling her numerous tribe with a rod of iron, and her second daughter's eldest girl had a look of Suzanne.

At the time, he'd wondered. But he'd had no reason to suppose that her husband wasn't ploughing the same furrow on a nightly basis and with far more vigour, and Perrette herself had given no sign of doubt.

Raoul though... Philippe tried to imagine the boy in the toils of a lusty peasant, and failed. But there were any number of bored Society matrons who would have been only too willing to oblige, at a hint from the Comte or even without. As a question of pure comparison, of course.

He cursed beneath his breath, feeling for the steps of a steep splintered staircase in the flickering below-stage dark. In the distance faint lights glimmered behind glass like dying embers amid the shadows that clustered at his heels, and he held the lantern higher to peer for footmarks in the dust.

" _Raoul!_ " Silence.

He should have done something. He should have got the boy some experience when he first brought him to Paris, before Raoul had begun hanging around the Opera like a mooncalf, before the girl had poured her ghost-stories into his ears — and then none of them would be down here now, in this labyrinth of trap-doors and endless black.

If only Raoul's cat-ghost could be real after all. If only there were a rival of flesh and blood, the Comte would gladly shake him by the hand... if he could just whisk the Daaé girl out of their lives as if she had never been, and give Philippe back the little brother he loved. And at this moment would so cheerfully throttle.

Another staircase. This time, there were tracks. Philippe plunged down the breakneck flight, all composure briefly forgotten. Confused marks... He raised the lantern again, revealing vaulted halls like some vast undercroft, and strained his eyes up and down those long galleries for some distant glimmer of a white shirt-front or a pale unconscious face.

This must be the cellar of Raoul's ravings. By all accounts, he'd been trying to make his way down here the whole time the Comte had been chasing after him on the road to Brussels. Fine fools that had made them look — but what else was Philippe to think, when Raoul had jumped up mid-performance and the girl had been whisked off the stage as if into a lover's arms?

Raoul had had the whole thing planned. He'd laid it out like a naval expedition: route, provisions, men and horses, papers in a neat packet to cross the border. He'd done it all in twelve hours, with a fierce efficiency no captain could have faulted and their mother's calm, cool determination, and Philippe, unravelling the trail, had been torn between pride and fury.

The boy had taken top honours in his training ship. He'd been on the point of joining an expedition that could make his name: a chance which had cost considerable influence to gain. He'd given every evidence of fine abilities, when he chose to use them. Instead, he'd been ready to throw his future away in the name of some slip of a Swedish-born singer who'd thought scandal could blackmail the Comte de Chagny into consent — a consent they would not get, not under the laws of the Code. And he'd funded it all by pawning their mother's jewels.

It was that discovery, some three hours before the performance, that had tipped Philippe into cold rage. The de Moerogis garnets had been meant for Raoul's bride. They'd been a beautiful set, ear-drops and necklace fringed with filigree silver, but their sentimental value was far greater than their worth. They were a memory from Philippe's earliest childhood, and the Comtesse Éléonore wore them in the portrait that smiled down on her sons from the staircase every night. They'd been entrusted to Raoul on his twenty-first birthday this very winter as a sacred gift. And the Vicomte, whose brother administered his entire inheritance, had found himself in need of sums quite beyond his allowance and had blithely dishonoured the legacy of the mother he'd never known.

The jewels, redeemed, lay locked now within Philippe's desk where they had always belonged. He'd done his best to forestall Raoul's flight by bribery and browbeating, had largely failed, and had arrived at the Opera tonight in a state of icy self-control beneath the eyes of every gossip in town. He'd hoped to learn exactly what his brother had to say for himself, but if the Vicomte lacked the courage to face him, then he'd had every intention of pursuing the fugitives and overtaking them before they could leave Paris. And when he'd seen Raoul's hasty exit, he'd rushed to do just that.

Between the two of them, Philippe decided bitterly, they'd stirred up enough scandal in the last few hours to keep Paris in a ferment for a twelvemonth. But down here, in these crypt-like halls, scandal was beginning to seem very distant and the cold silence of the cellar all too real. His own breath seemed a deafening intrusion in the dark, and yet the walls drank and swallowed the sound of his footsteps as if in a suffocating fog, and the long passage stretched out ahead like a gullet to the bowels of the earth.

He drew breath sharply to call to Raoul again, fear for the boy flooding over him, but the thick silence caught in his throat and the impulse died.

There had been no trace of Raoul anywhere along the road. The Comte's own horses were better than any his brother could have hired, but not so good as all that; Philippe had grown first suspicious, then — remembering Raoul's wild talk — alarmed. He'd ordered his driver to turn back for the Opera House with all speed, and arrived in time to find the whole establishment in chaos, a police inspector holding forth on the stage, and Raoul's hat lying forlorn and abandoned together with an empty pistol-case... but he'd found no sign of Raoul.

Whatever the young fool had planned for his elopement, it had clearly gone very wrong. If there ever had been an elopement and not some mere construct of a love-sick mind: the thought slid in sidelong like the caperings of a zany in the street, and Philippe thrust it back swiftly, unacknowledged.

It hadn't taken long to learn that Raoul had been repeatedly denied access to the mezzanines below the stage, or to guess that he had in the end found some way down there in despite of the prohibition. Nor had it taken long, once he demanded it, for Philippe to gain access in his turn: doors that were closed to a pale youth of twenty opened miraculously before the anger of the Comte de Chagny. He'd plunged down in pursuit, prepared to drag his little brother out by the scruff of the neck and shake him back into sanity if he had to.

But he was cold and alone and increasingly unsure, and somewhere along the line the last of that saving spark of fury was ebbing and ebbing away. He had lost Raoul — lost him no less surely to the encroaching dark than to the bitter words they'd hurled at each other last night and to the boy's silent determination of this morning. Raoul had never meant to come back, he understood that too late: each stubborn _adieu_ had been a dull knife-blow between them, cutting off all the family the boy had ever known and everything he'd ever hoped or cared for... all for her.

She was not worth it. Nothing was worth it, not Philippe's anger or his authority or the de Chagny name. He'd loved Raoul so much, brought him here with such joy and such pride... and in that moment he knew in his heart that he would have given anything in the world to see his little brother come limping forward out of the shadows, half shamefaced and half triumphant, with the girl of his choice held safe within his arm.

He stared around in something like desperation. At his feet blurred marks mocked him in the dust: the shuffling trace of some old workman or merely the sweep of a rat's tail. Or a heartbroken boy wandering in the dark...

There. Philippe caught the ends of his moustache between his teeth, biting down fiercely as if to capture the moment. He'd seen something. There, in the distance, a dim flicker... fugitive, then gone. Then — as he began to run, faster and faster, shaking off disbelief — then a pale shifting gleam up ahead, like—

Like moonlight. Moonlight filtering across sullen water, motionless and utterly black. All else forgotten, Philippe came to an abrupt halt, staring.

Somewhere unseen and far above the moon rode serenely overhead, cool Diana untouched by human hope or by desire. And through some distant air-shaft or iron-clad grate her light came drifting down, an eerie silver-blue that gleamed across the hidden lake but left its shadowed depths untouched.

The lake of Raoul's Christine, he realised at last, stunned mind beginning to work slowly. The sunless sea of those wild rumours, across which she claimed she had been carried off to duress like some latterday Proserpine... he'd scorned his brother's naïvety at such a convenient tale, but there the water lay, heavy and silent, swollen with secrets and names it would never disgorge.

And Raoul— would Raoul, desperate, have plunged across those depths in quest of a shred of hope? The thought was an icy touch that could not be banished; Philippe went swiftly down to the shore. Surely Raoul would not have plunged in fully-clad — there would be some sign...

The water was oily beneath the lamplight, lapping gently with a soft sound he had not noticed before. There was no sign of the discarded coat and boots he had half-feared to find, and he breathed more easily, listening to the quickening ripples in the dark. They had a music of their own: an invitation that washed away fears and anger and soothed the soul.

Indeed, it seemed to him that he could hear true music, the sweetest and softest of sighs. He knelt to set down the lantern and on impulse closed the shutter; the music was brighter when freed from that harsh yellow glare. As he leaned out it sang to him like crystalline tear-drops, like moonlight on snow... and it seemed to him suddenly that he was there in Raoul's tale of the winter churchyard in Perros-Guirec, kneeling before a cross drenched in weightless light with Raoul at his side as the music of the heavens poured out across them both.

It was no earthly instrument, and yet some part of his mind found it in memory; recognised the tune. The old fiddler had played it for him at Professor Valerius' urging on a distant summer's day, not the rustic dance he'd been expecting but Schubert's "Lazarus", transfigured beneath Daaé's hands into something sublime.

Memory rose around him, coiling softly from the water and drawing him closer, entranced. Afternoon sun crept thick and warm across the threshold of the cottage where he listened to Daaé's art, the last drowsy drops of the dying day... and somehow Raoul was with him there too as the fair-haired child of those golden sands, wide-set eyes shining with the joy of one who has just been promised a summer and a violin.

Ripples became an arrowhead. The water swirled. But when arms reached up around the elder brother's neck to wind as tightly as could be, Philippe made no attempt to resist.

In his dream, he pressed Raoul in turn in his embrace, and the choking grip clung fiercely close, a small hard head nuzzled up against his throat, forgiven and forgiving. When dizzy blackness brought him beneath the surface and monstrous hands held him under, he was too far gone to struggle. Or — despite his brother's wild grief, later — to be afraid.


End file.
